The Learning Ladder Computer Basics Module

Using the Internet (continued)

Links and URLs

The most important thing about web pages that makes them different from other documents is that they can connect to each other with hyperlinks (or just "links" for short). A link can be a picture, or plain text, that you click on to go somewhere else. You've been following links to move from page to page in this site.

A link can connect pages in sites to each other - aswe've been doing, to let you move from page to page within this site - or to any other web page, anywhere in the world!

For example, here is a link to yahoo.com. If you click the words in the link, your browser will load the page at yahoo.com.

A link has two main parts: the text or picture that you click on to activate it, and the URL of the page to load when it's clicked. A URL (which stands for "Uniform Resource Locator", and means "address") looks like this:

http://learningladder.org/index.htm

There are three parts to every URL:

The protocol for web pages is almost always "http://".

The domain is usually the main name of the site, school, business, or organizer of the site. It tells the browser where to find the page.

The page is the actual page to load. The browser first connects to the domain, and then asks for the page.

To move around on the web, you can follow links on web pages, or you can type URLs yourself in the address bar of your browser. To do this, click in the address bar, select and delete the text that's there, type the URL you want to visit, and press enter. (You have to be careful typing them - one mistake and the page will usually not load!)

To help you avoid having to type URLs over and over for sites you visit frequently, your browser can save bookmarks, (sometimes called favorites). We'll talk about that on the next page.

Click "next" to continue to the next page.

Home | Basics Home | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5